It appears that Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman (and mother) who had been sentenced to death for blasphemy, will be pardoned by Pakistan’s president. It appears that the international outcry has helped to some extent.
Most cases of martyrdom (or near martyrdom) these days will fall into the following categories:
- governments that act in the shadows, secretly “disappearing” people – this happens in very restrictive regimes.
- governments that find someone is very publicly sentenced to death – but many times the government will back down.
- mob action or isolated action by fundamentalists.
The simple fact is, most martyrdoms are either going to be spur of the moment things or hidden in the shadows, because if there’s any length of time – if an execution is “scheduled” – then typically international pressure is going to be brought to bear.
So we can look at the statistics and see that the martyrdom rate is declining. That’s a good thing.
But what the stats don’t show so easily is the growth in persecution that does not lead to martyrdom. For example: expulsions, imprisonment, boycotts, threats, kidnappings, forced marriage, etc. In a book I ghostwrote for Open Doors many years ago – Please Pray for Us: Praying for Persecuted Christians in 52 Nations – I attempted to measure the increase in the rate of persecution. This really ought to be done again today. I think we’d find that there is an increase now.
There’s really not much that can be done about it, but it affects everything we do in terms of mission. It’s something to bear in mind: even if you are working in relative freedom now, any strategy that falls apart in the context of persecution isn’t a strategy that is likely to endure.
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